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1. Chiropractic as a profession, has been around for 120 years, but the principles that chiropractic is based on aren’t new. In fact the ancient Greeks and other early civilizations use spinal adjustments as a form of healthcare. Hippocrates, the father of Western Medicine stated that “physical structure is the basis of medicine” and went into great detail concerning the importance of the spine to good health.
2. There are now approximately 100,000 chiropractors worldwide with over 40 chiropractic schools in 16 countries.
3. Interestingly, chiropractors don’t just adjust parts of the spine at random. If you have been to a chiropractor you will have noticed that they touch and feel your spine, move it around, test your muscles to see how strong they are, press on parts of your spine to find out if it is tender at particular points and so on. In the end the very carefully choose specific spinal segments to adjust. The segments that chiropractors choose to adjust will often have corresponding muscle tightness and tenderness if pushed upon. And the joint will have abnormal movement. These abnormalities, among others, indicate the presence of what we chiropractors call a vertebral subluxation.
4. When a spinal segment doesn’t move properly, it actually appears to influence how the brain perceives and responds to all other sensory information.
5. It is thought that your brain cannot see what is going on in the spine when the bones in the spine don’t move properly because if the spinal bones (vertebra) are not moving properly then the small muscles closest to you spine will not be moving as much, and these muscles are your brain’s ‘eyes’ in the spine because these little muscles have loads of movement sensors.
6. What is really fascinating is that when the spine is not working properly this can influence not just how the brain controls the spine, but also how the brain can “see” what is going on in your arms and legs. So this means that chiropractic care can make you less clumsy. Several studies have shown that your brain becomes more accurately aware of where your arms and legs are even with your eyes closed.
7. So it’s a fact that chiropractic care improves spinal function. What is really cool is that chiropractic care does not just make your spine work better but it also improves coordination of your arms and legs.
8. 12 weeks of chiropractic care even helps you physically feel better. A study showed that three months of chiropractic cares improved their participants’ physical component of health-related quality of life compared to the control group.
9. 12 weeks of chiropractic care has also been shown to improve sensorimotor function related to falls risk in community dwelling older adults. This may well mean that chiropractic care can help to reduce the number of falls that older adults suffer. The results also indicate that the participants themselves experienced a greater physical quality of life after as little as three months of chiropractic care.
10. And to top it off, chiropractic care is safe, even for kids and babies. Chiropractic care for children and infants is rarely associated with adverse events. When they do occur they invariably involve short periods of muscle soreness following and adjustment. Researchers have reviewed all of the published literature relating to chiropractic care for infants and children to see how common adverse events are in our younger patients.
11. Chiropractic care has even been shown to help babies with Colic cry less. In one randomized controlled trial that investigated the effects of 10 days of chiropractic care on crying time in infants with colic, the babies who received chiropractic care cried significantly less than those who were in the control group. Their crying time reduced by about half, with the babies who received care crying an hour and a half less on average after 10 days compared to the babies that received no care. Multiple other randomized controlled clinical trials have shown that chiropractic manual therapy improves crying behavior in infants with colic. Parent of infants suffering from colic should consider giving chiropractic a go because it could well make a real difference to their baby and their family.
12. Back to the brain, several studies have shown that chiropractic care changes the way your brain sends messages to your muscles. So all this research seems to indicate that chiropractic care improves your brain body communication, helping your brain be more aware of what is going on in the body so it can control your body better.
13. One study has even shown that chiropractic care can make your stronger. And the amazing thing is that the changes within the central nervous system seen in this study was very similar to what has previously been show after 3 weeks of strength training, indicating that chiropractic care has powerful changes to the brain and spinal cord.
14. Recently a study looking at the brain effects of chiropractic found that the big brain changes that do take place when a chiropractor adjusts dysfunctional spinal segments, these changes in the brain take place in a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex.